I really wish there was a version of VMS that ran x86 hardware. Wasn't HP porting it to Itanium?

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick

This is my kind of thread. I think that for me it's bordering on a fetish really - as I find myself compelled to use the most obscure, niche operating systems. My list of favs: FreeBSD/NetBSD, Haiku, Minix and RiscOS.

A lot has improved in that OS group since this thread was last touched. I now use Haiku for most of my informal, non-critical web browsing, and it improves steadily. Minix3 has been upgraded by adding Xorg and in addition it uses NetBSD pkgsrc. FreeBSD is still "the rock" for the important stuff...

Nice necro thread bump! I'm in the process of swapping out all Linux installs with BSDs. I've got OpenBSD i386 on a desktop, and my ThinkPad will either get OpenBSD or PC-BSD. Another i386 desktop will either get OpenBSD, or FreeBSD (currently running Slackware 14.1).

I have Tails on a USB stick for paranoid surfing. I was a huge fan of BeOS back-in-the-day, and I have tried Haiku, but the thrill is gone, I just don't care any more. I'm thinking of giving Minix a try, haven't done so yet.

Nice necro thread bump! I'm in the process of swapping out all Linux installs with BSDs. I've got OpenBSD i386 on a desktop, and my ThinkPad will either get OpenBSD or PC-BSD. Another i386 desktop will either get OpenBSD, or FreeBSD (currently running Slackware 14.1).

I have Tails on a USB stick for paranoid surfing. I was a huge fan of BeOS back-in-the-day, and I have tried Haiku, but the thrill is gone, I just don't care any more. I'm thinking of giving Minix a try, haven't done so yet.

Yeah - I used to run Slack - way back then. Guess it's having a 20'th year anniversary.

Nice thing about Haiku is its "anyboot" image, which is a super easy USB-live-with-web setup, unlike FreeBSD where you have to build a stick manually - and set up various things like the memory-based-disk replacements for directories with heavy IO.

Lately, my pet project has been RicsOS (open). It's probably the only OS out there that is truly unique.

On the other hand, I've been playing around, during the past few days, with A2/Oberon - an operating system and development environment that had its genesis in the nineties. It has a devout, but small, following on the forums at ethz.ch.

Anyone else here ever heard about or used it? Its WEB browser is about as fancy as a very early Navigator, but without java-script. One neat thing is that a compressed image of the disk partition, created with the default ISO installer, and including many apps and a dev environment, is only 32MB.

Interestingly, just a few hours after having my (yet to be moderated) posting about Plan9/Inferno posted here, I've read that Plan 9 is GNU-licensed now. Not sure if that's a good move. (I can't post the URL yet - it's on TheRegister.)